It’s very rare, but every so often we do hear about a good cop–in this case, an officer who refused to torture a college student. Of course, the outcome of these cases is quite predictable: the good cop gets fired.

This completely unsurprising event follows closely on the equally unsurprising lack of indictment of the cop in Ferguson. From the reaction to both events, it’s pretty obvious that most people have no idea what a grand jury does. To put it simply, a grand jury does exactly what the prosecutor tells it to do. This has led to a fairly well known saying that a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich. The Simple Justice blog addresses the Ferguson case in a post titled The Ferguson Lie.

The cops and their apologists (what L. Neil Smith called “cop suckers”) are certainly happy, but they shouldn’t be. As John F. Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” The government has just given the rest of us two very clear illustrations of the impossibility of peaceful revolution.